- Bard made a big mistake in an example presented by Google on Monday, February 7
- ChatGPT’s competing AI claims that the JWST is the first telescope to have been able to image an exoplanet, while this first dates from 2004 and was carried out by the VLT, an observatory on Earth
- This error comes on top of an official presentation on Wednesday, February 8, widely perceived as unconvincing.
- In response, Alphabet shares plunged sharply on Wednesday, and appeared to stabilize Thursday, February 9, 2023 below the $100 mark.
In competitive matters, it is always more complicated to come second… especially when the competitor is called ChatGPT and the latter is already used by more than 100 million users worldwide. Google has been working on its own conversational AI for a very long time.
We thus remember LaMDA, its language model dedicated to conversations presented in 2021 on which Bard is based. However ChatGPT seems to go beyond Google’s technology at the time of this writing. This forces the Google teams to go fast to reduce the distance… and therefore mechanically leads to making a few mistakes along the way.
Was Google Bard made in a rush?
When Sundar Pichai announces Bard in a blog post on Monday, he embellishes his post with a gif (repeated in the official Google tweet below) supposedly showing what a request looks like and Bard’s typical response.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
– Google Google) February 6, 2023
The question was: “What discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old daughter about?”. Bard then answers three highlights in the form of a bulleted list. But the last point immediately made Internet users wince. Indeed Bard simply shows in this example its lack of reliability – in addition to a worrying lack of internal fact-checking on the side of Google teams.
The JWST is not the first telescope to successfully image an exoplanet. The first to have done so was the Very Large Telescope installed at the top of the Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert in Chile (the object in question is called 2M1207b more info here). Bard here seems to confuse an article from NASA which announces that the JWST took “her” first image of an exoplanet in 2022.
Of course ChatGPT also makes mistakes. The system is in beta and an OpenIA disclaimer clearly urges users to beware of its responses. But the fact that the Google teams, CEOs included, did not address the problem from the outset contributes to giving a feeling of haste.
And then there is above all this presentation from Paris, of which you can watch the replay above. Google was supposed to show more of its AI capabilities and how it will be integrated into the entire Google ecosystem. In the end, nothing really managed to divert attention from ChatGPT and the integration (in beta) of this AI into Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Sign that we are here on a new technological war with crucial stakes, the shareholders immediately sanctioned Alphabet. The capitalization of the group lost 100 billion dollars in a few hours, and the price did not seem to go up on Thursday February 9, 2023 – seeming to remain pegged under 100 dollars…
